IETF's MARID Is Dead

Daniel Goldman writes "According to this post, from Ted Hardie Co-Area Director for Applications, the IETF will be closing the MARID Working Group. This working group planned to develop a DNS-based mechanism for storing and distributing information associated with MTA authorization to prevent spam. It was chartered after extensive discussion of the issues in the IRTF's Anti-spam Research Group."

Long live SPF

[photon317]

Long live SPF

Re:Long live SPF

[photon317]

Troll? Dumbass

What does this mean?

[alatesystems]

Does this mean that they are just not researching it anymore because SPF [pobox.com] is awesome? Or does this mean that they are not going to certify anything that deals with DNS based TXT records showing who should be able to send mail from certain domains?

This is very vague. I looked at the FA but it's extremely boring and fixed width font and it kept making me fall asleep. I scanned it for comprehension, but I was unable to figure out what is going on.

Chris

what a shame

[powdered toast dude]

SPF+SRS works. This group's failure is entirely based in politics.

Re:what a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

For those with acronym overload, that's SPF (Sender Policy Framework) [pobox.com] + SRS (Sender Rewriting Scheme) [pobox.com].

Re:what a shame

[OldTurkeyBuzzard]

> SPF+SRS works
Not necessarily. SPF breaks a fair bit of existing stuff (forwarding) and SRS is not quite the complete workaround for that. For instance, one cannot afford to reject mail from a "reputed-than-thou" forwarding source which simply ignores the SRS.

Re:what a shame

[powdered toast dude]

Not sure what a "reputed than thou" forwarding source is. If you're saying SPF and SRS are flawed, I disagree. If you're saying that both must be deployed for forwarding to work, I agree.

• If you want to ignore SRS, then either (a) don't forward emails or (2) don't publish SPF records.
• If you want to publish SPF records and support forwarding, then deploy SRS too.

Simple, really.

Nice summary...NOT

[jhoffoss]

So what the aformentioned post states:

The group is divided on technical issues (meaning bickering about this or that, I assume) related to how the TXT record should be formatted and chacked by MTAs.

The group is also sick of the IP bickering between Apache/Debian, et. al. and MS, et. al., rather than purely engineering tasks.

In the end, the group will make no headway, because no one will concede or compromise on the technical aspects of MARID's goal. Microsoft's IP claims only seem to be a final blow.

Instead of the group coming up with a [proposed] standard, they are asking each individual entity to put forth their document as an RFC.

So it seems MS, SPF, etc. will each put forth their version of the standard, and may the best RFC win.

Next time you submit a story, how about you actually include something about it in the description?

Re:Nice summary...NOT

[fnord123]

Actually they are not being "put forth [as] standard". The experimental drafts track (which is where the ADs and chairs just consigned the various proposals) is most definitely not the standards track.

All the various proposals are now considered (by the IETF) as experiments. They are being documented as experimental RFCs and the various authors have been told to go off and try them out and prove they work.

Maybe in a year or two the IETF will look and say, "ok, it is clear that solution X is working and

Sums up ...

[Martin Spamer]

How the IETF & W3C standards processes for ID's & RFC's are breaking down. They are meta-morphing into the bloated committees of vested interests of old, that have failed to keep pace with developments. Though this is probably what the vested interests want, so they marginalised contributors that don't work for famous name, even if you're representing the first and only organisation to actually have a working system in the field.

A member's resons for being disappointed

[rduke15]

I found this post in the mailing list [gmane.org] about the closing of the working group interesting.

A lot of the blame seems to go to MS. Strange that the article here didn't attract more MS bashing comments. Maybe most slashdotters don't know what has been going on and didn't realize this was a good opportunity for anti-MS karma whoring? :-)

Anyway, I'm glad MS didn't manage to sneak patents into a standard. As a previous poster said: "Long live SPF [pobox.com]".